Critical Essay by Carey Horwitz

[Sixty Stories] begins with five from Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964) and continues through nine recent, uncollected pieces. It's a good time for this collection, for the time of this collection—from Kennedy through Carter, to put convenient correlatives upon it—is a discrete period, begun and ended, a period whose social, moral, and emotional landscape has been represented by Barthelme better than by most.

If the period is of a piece, so too are these stories. Not much has changed over the years: There are the philosophical excursions, the blurred dialogues, the cinematic descriptions, the nasty/chic relationships. And there is the language, still transforming the banal into the surreal and vice versa, still constructing syllogisms that challenge us to accept the shifting internal logic of a story as no less valid than the shifting logic of our...